Cascade Read online

  CASCADE

  CASCADE

  MARYANNE O’HARA

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Maryanne O’Hara, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Page vii: Excerpt from “The Ruins of Time” from Near the Ocean by Robert Lowell.

  Copyright © 1967 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.

  Art credits

  Pages 248–249: Walker Evans, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,

  FSA / OWI Collection (LC-USF533-006712-M5)

  Pages 332–333: Courtesy of CardCow.com

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  O’Hara, Maryanne.

  Cascade / Maryanne O’Hara.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58380-7

  1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 4. Life change events—Fiction. 5. Artists—Fiction. 6. Massachusetts—Fiction.

  7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3615.H37C37 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011043918

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Carre Noir Std

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To Nick and Caitlin

  Don trí mhuicín

  O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once was fugitive maintains its permanence.

  —Robert Lowell, “The Ruins of Time”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To those who offered advice and encouragement during the long period when I first conceived Cascade as a short story and then a novel, I say thank you: Monique Hamze, Susan Conley, Lily King, Electa Sevier, Diane Whittemore, Katie Whittemore, Janet Tashjian, Don Lee, DeWitt Henry, Ellen Tarlin, Ellie Frazier, Pamela Painter, and members of my old writer’s group: Ted Weesner, Jr., Nicole Lamy, Audrey Schulman, Tyler Clements, Dan Zevin. A double thank you to Ted for recommending me for a St. Botolph Club emerging writer’s grant, and thank you to the St. Botolph Club for awarding me that grant, which marked the true beginnings of this novel getting off the ground. The Massachusetts Cultural Council also recognized Cascade in its early stages, and I’m grateful for the support.

  I am indebted to those people who provided me with crucial details about art and the time period, about dams and winches and land assessments and Shakespeare: my mother Florence Bavaro and her extraordinary memory, the late, lovely Frances Poole, Evelyn Gates, Joe Antonellis, Rick Cullen, Clif Read at the Quabbin Reservoir Visitor’s Center, Georgianna Ziegler at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and some extraordinary artists: my beloved brother Michael Bavaro, Bobbi Robbins, Jack Tremblay, and three former W.P.A artists—James Lechay, Alan Rohan Crite, and Paul Cadmus. I would also like to recognize the former residents of the Swift River Valley, whose sacrifice inspired this book.

  I always had faith that when the time came, this book would find the right editor. Thank you to the elegant Kathryn Court for her grace and care with Cascade, and for assembling a superb support team, which has been so capably led by Tara Singh.

  Stephanie Cabot is more than a wonderful agent; she’s a remarkable human being, and I am fortunate indeed to have her, Anna Worrall, and the rest of the Gernert Company on my side.

  Finally, I cannot imagine life without my brilliant daughter, Caitlin, an astute reader and natural editor whose insights and wisdom informed so much of this book. And for the love and support of my husband, the unique and generous Nick O’Hara, I am eternally thankful.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Authors_Note

  1

  December 1934

  AND SOMETHING BECOMES SOMETHING ELSE

  During his final days, William Hart was haunted by drowning dreams. Every night, at the sound of his shouts, Dez came awake herself, always briefly startled to find a husband—Asa—sleeping beside her. She would dash across the hall, fearing another heart attack, but by then her father would be lying quietly, gazing at the plaster ceiling. Probably half the town was having drowning dreams, she’d say, reminding him that the reservoir was an old rumor and ticking off good reasons why it would never happen—the state had looked to Cascade before. If it was too expensive to build so far from Boston six years ago, then surely, in these hard times, nothing would come of it.

  Usually that kind of talk made him feel better and in the morning he’d be rested and fairly optimistic, ready for whatever diversion she had planned for him—a new copy of The American Sunday Standard borrowed from the library, a coil of his favorite black licorice from the Handy Grocery, an offer of a game of chess.

  But the night after Christmas, he hushed her irritably—“Desdemona!”—as if she were still a child. His white hair spread across three pillows, his eyes blazed. He was frail, but he was also a lifelong player of Shakespearean kings; he could still play the part of regal.

  “There are so many ways of drowning, my dear.”

  They passed a moment without speaking. Downstairs, the banjo clock ticked, and across the river, a train blew its horn. William Hart’s stage, where stars lik
e Lionel Barrymore and Kathryn Tranero had taken bows, had been dark last season for the first time in twenty-five years. That darkness was all he thought about.

  “We’re not going to drown,” Dez said firmly, and slipped from the room before she could confess that she, too, was under water. She had been since September, when the dean of the Boston Museum School called her in to say that her tuition had not been paid, since Rose wrote, He’s had to let Annie go, the yardman, everyone but me.

  The next morning, the diversion was French meringues, a first for her—she wasn’t much of a cook. And she was dubious, eyeing the puddle of clear slime at the bottom of the copper bowl Rose said to use. Remarkable to think that this beater contraption would change all that, but Rose had said earlier, “Have faith,” and so she gripped the red wooden handle with her left hand and began to crank with her right, beating air into the eggs, faster and faster. Don’t stop, Rose said, even when your arm feels like it’s going to fall off. Which it did, becoming separate, mechanical, a moving part thrusting forward and around, forward and around. She became conscious of the linoleum under her shoes, the countertop digging against her hips, arm crying out stop, but it was fascinating, too, to see how the nonstop forcing of one thing into another could cause such a complete transformation. Air into egg. Increasing in volume, expanding, until all at once the bowl was full of shiny white meringue, thick and lustrous as paint. Sweet on the tongue. She spooned dollops of it into Rose’s canvas pastry bag, then—a whim—piped it into tiny sculptures: why not? A dozen pointy kings’ crowns to make her father laugh.

  She slid the baking sheet into the oven, where the meringues would spend hours drying out. Then she washed up the bowl, the beaters, the spoon. She set everything on the draining board and paused by the window to catch her breath. Outside, the day was grim and overcast, a few stray snowflakes starting to drift down from the sky. It was the kind of day that would turn to night without fanfare, with a gradual extinguishing of light, the kind of day that pierced you with melancholy and reminded you it was only December, that a whole winter had still to be gotten through.

  And what would spring bring? What once seemed an interim, a transitory phase only, was dragging on into endless day-to-day existence. What the country had named the Depression wasn’t getting much better, and a lot of people were starting to worry that maybe the United States of America was one big experiment that had failed. You could feel it in the streets, in the very air—no one had any idea what was going to happen. The future was one big void they were all stepping into. Every night, Asa came home with more bad news picked up in the drugstore: the Cascade Hotel had closed another floor, Warren Estes was closing the boating supplies shop for good, turning the Water Street property into a filling station. Their once-fashionable resort town with its pleasant waters was looking more and more like the ghost valley that was invading dreams and even the pages of her sketchpad. She had done half a dozen studies: the drowning person’s blurred upward view from the bottom of a flooded place. The bleary, uncertain light. The smooth stones, long grasses, and someone struggling through thick river mud, Ophelia-like, trying to find a place to breathe.

  The banjo clock began its low, rhythmic chiming and she turned from the window. Eleven o’clock. Her father would nap for hours now, Rose wouldn’t be back today, and if she was lucky, she could make real, uninterrupted headway on her new piece.

  2

  At first she assumed he was a hobo. They sometimes hopped off the trains and mooched around town for food. The man on the porch had that same hungry look, but he was clean-shaven, wore a pressed gray suit, and carried a large satchel. A jalopy Dez hadn’t seen for months sat in the driveway behind him: black with big fenders and bug-eye headlights, faded gold lettering on the door: Sid Solomon Wares.

  Dez remembered hearing Ethel Bentonford in the Handy Grocery, back in September, clucking her tongue. Did you hear the old Jew-man died? He was a nice man, too. I miss the truck coming around. You get to depending on them.

  The man on the porch introduced himself as Jacob Solomon. He didn’t wear the stovepipe hat his father used to wear, nor the little black skullcap beneath it, but a gray flannel trilby that he removed and tucked under his arm when she said how sorry she was to hear about his father. He was slight and somewhat self-effacing, at first glance almost nondescript, a person you might describe by saying he had dark hair. But his eyes were keen and watchful as he took in first her face, and then her smock and paintbrush at the instant she realized her brush was about to drip. Then, a small commotion, laughter, cupping one hand under the other to rush back to her studio, where he examined her canvas, a winter study of the buildings facing Cascade Common, at twilight.

  “If you add a layer of gesso mixed with a little powdered charcoal,” he said, “you’ll get streaky, translucent shadows that will really suit what you’re doing, I think.”

  His advice was matter-of-fact, confident, and she turned to look more closely at him, to marvel, really, to see who in Cascade could possibly know such a thing. Then she remembered Sid, on his rounds, talking about an artist son. He is in New York. He is in Spain. He is in Germany with his mother’s people now, painting who knows what. Great things, that I know. She hadn’t paid too much attention to Mr. Solomon—so many people bombarded you with anecdotes about their sons and brothers when you told them you painted. But now she thought about it, she remembered he had also said that his son had taught art classes. In New York.

  An hour went by like the wind, an hour that was a back-and-forth comparing of experiences—where they’d done their training, and with whom, and where they’d traveled. (After New York, it had been Spain, Amsterdam, then Germany for him; she had gone from Provincetown to Paris.)

  And then, in the kitchen, over a pot of coffee and some stale cigarettes Dez found in a drawer in Asa’s desk—while her father napped, while the meringues slowly dried, while the kitchen developed a remarkable coziness it usually lacked—they argued about who was good and who was great. Great was Goya, Jacob said, no question. Goya was the only reason he’d gotten on that crazy freight boat out of Brooklyn in the first place.

  “Oh, but they’re so brutal!”

  That amused him. “But don’t you see why? He’s conveying everything that’s usually so interior, so under the surface. He’s a genius at it. And his use of light—” He stopped, lost in thought. “Well, you’d want to see them in person, of course, color plates can only convey so much.”

  He drew deeply on his cigarette, held the smoke, then let it out with a troubled sigh. “But who knows when any of us will see them again? Things were getting unpleasant all over Europe by the time I left.” He stubbed out the cigarette as Dez thought back on Paris—how close that beloved place was to the unrest they were starting to hear about. You hoped nothing would come of it all—men had surely had their fill of war after the last one. Still, there was that nagging sense of worry.

  A thump on the ceiling brought them back to the kitchen, to the cups of coffee, drunk down to dregs, to the saucer Dez had set out as ashtray, gray with ash, Jacob’s open satchel sitting by the chair. He had sales to make; she needed to get upstairs to tend to her father. But first, she thought, well, they had to arrange to meet again.

  3

  “You changed your will?” Was that what he’d just said? Her father, back in bed after the exertion of a walk, was mumbling, and when she swung around from hanging his cardigan to look directly at him, he hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that he had given the playhouse to Asa, back in October, after their wedding. “As a dowry of sorts.”

  She blinked. She stood up a little straighter. “Are you joking? And the two of you kept this a secret from me?”

  “No secret, my girl.” He tried to speak matter-of-factly, jovially. “Just business between men.”

  With that, she walked over to the window and laid her forehead against the cold glass. Outside, the snow had begun to fall thicker, faster. The unexpected hour with Jacob Solomon
had left her preoccupied; she’d let her father have his way when he insisted on taking a walk outside, even though Dr. Proulx had said no to outdoor ventures. He’d headed straight to the bench at the end of the lawn for a clear view across the river to the town common, where their old house and his theater sat diagonally across from each other. As he’d rattled on about the playhouse, she hadn’t paid much attention, but now she realized he must have been looking for a way to break this news to her.

  “You actually put the deed in Asa’s name? Why would you do such a thing?”

  His face flooded with blood. “I couldn’t come here empty-handed,” he said bitterly, “like some drifter, no better than a hobo. I am a bankrupt, Desdemona.”

  “Oh, Dad.” In all these months, he’d never used the phrase. Not in spring, while she was still in Boston and he was scraping money together to pay the mortgage he had taken out after the first of the staggering financial-market losses. Not when he broke down and sold his beloved First Folio and everything else in the Shakespeare collection. Even after the foreclosure on their home, he had never used that phrase.

  A bankrupt. He hadn’t actually had to declare legal bankruptcy—by selling everything else he’d managed to skid to that precipice and stop before the playhouse went over the cliff, too. “First of all, you are not a bankrupt. And I can understand how you felt, of course I can, but to give it away after all you sacrificed to save it—”

  “I hardly gave it away. Asa’s your husband, after all. But I do have something else, just for you.” He gestured to his bureau, where one of his theater props—Portia’s casket—sat among a stack of books. Had Rose retrieved that from the playhouse?

  Portia’s casket was a small, leaden chest that he used for Merchant of Venice performances. When Dez carried it over to the bed, he pushed it back into her hands with purpose. “It’s for you.”

  Odd, she thought. An odd choice of gift. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia is an heiress who is not free to decide whom she will marry—her father’s will has stipulated that the suitor who wins her must choose the box—gold, silver, or lead—that contains her portrait.